Asian American Literature is a capacious field which is ever-expanding into the transnational, transpacific, and comparative. One direction in which a new generation of scholars is starting to delve is into the archive of writing in languages other than English, most often the languages of individuals’ countries of origin. In this panel, we by coincidence have three excellent submissions looking at newspapers which shaped early Asian American communities, each in a different east Asian language. These newspapers created their own small literary and social communities, and not much is known about these early print cultures of Asian America. We are excited to bring these works into conversation. One paper by Prof. Izumi is from the well-studied camp newspapers of the Japanese American incarceration, but he focuses on the Japanese-language sections which are extremely little studied; we also note that Joey Kim’s paper focuses more on English language sections but will put them into dialogue with the bilingual paper’s construction. This panel continues our Forum’s interest in showcasing the literary history of Asian America. We have in recent years presented Floyd Cheung’s work in editing and contextualizing early Asian American literary works as well as Andrew Leong’s translations and investigations of early Japanese American literary culture.

Each presenter will be asked to strictly limit their paper to 15 minutes or less in order to leave time for discussion. We anticipate discussion amongst the presenters themselves as well as a lively conversation from the audience. We do not always have three such cohesive papers and we hope that this deep dive into the newspaper archive will produce a strong conversation about the construction of early political ideological development via a print culture.

Jeehyun Choi’s paper, “The Korean American Left Between Empires,” will examine a 1930s Korean American newspaper archive of short stories and political essays that encapsulate early Korean American leftist thought. These Korean-language works promise not only sociological and ethnographic significance but also a critical vision for broadening our understanding of the intimacies between early Korean America and colonial Korea. Historicizing the archival reading of Korean American fiction and intellectual debates specifically through an analysis of Japanese and American legal imperialisms, the paper traces leftist writings that leverage a dual-critique against Japan and America’s respective forms of racial capitalism.

Prof. Katsuya Izumi’s paper, “Reading the Particular Voices in the Archives of Manzanar Free Press”will focus on the handwritten sections in issues of Manzanar Free Press not because the Manzanar internment camp is perhaps the most well-known camp among others but because it is crucial to spotlight each victim’s history in Manzanar by reading and hearing the primary voices of the victims while famous representations (novels and films) of the voices are already available. Its Japanese sections are about the wide range of topics such as the importance of Buddhism, the information about the war in Asia and Europe, philosophical anecdotes about harmonious relationships (chōwa and kyōchō) to overcome the difficult situation in the camp, and various news about the daily events that happened to individual internees.

Finally, Prof. Joey Kim’s paper examines the second Chinese newspaper in the U.S., The Oriental; or, Tung-Ngai San-Luk, which began in 1855. It was dually edited by Presbyterian minister, William Speer, and associate editor Lai Sai (also known as Lee Kan). The newspaper’s publication schedule was inconsistent. Intended to be published triweekly in Chinese and weekly in English, its schedule was later changed to weekly in Chinese, monthly in English. This paper, however, starts the process of recovery with the English-language sections of this long-forgotten newspaper. The paper will survey representative items from the newspaper’s print run to offer an overview of how these items can expand the field of Asian American studies. In its announcements, current events, poems, paratexts, and ads, The Oriental racializes the Chinese community within emergent social identities of 1850’s California, including laborers, non-Christians, and foreigners. This paper makes the case for The Oriental as a formative site of collaboration between Christianity and racial capitalism that foreruns the emerging ideology of anti-Chinese and later anti-Asian national legislation.

Prof. Heidi Kim’s long experience with working with literatures in the U.S. in languages other than English, including her leadership of that MLA Forum, as well as her expertise in Asian American literary history and the Japanese American incarceration, will allow her to lead the discussion.